Chapter Twenty-Six

 

There were almost as many stairs as at Glanvil Terrace, but the fifth-floor landing was reached at last.  Sebastian paused before ringing the bell, to recover his breath and to remind himself that, on this occasion, the nausea on the threshold was entirely unjustified.  Who was Bruno Rontini anyhow?  Just an amiable old ass, too decent, by all accounts, to be sarcastic or censorious, and too completely a stranger for all his vague cousinships, to have the right to say unpleasant things, even if he wanted to.  Besides, it wasn't as if he, Sebastian, were going to confess his sins, or anything like that.  No, no, he wouldn't ask for help on that basis.  It would be a matter of just casually introducing the subject, as though it weren't really so very important after all.  'By the way, do you happen to know a fellow called Weyl?'  And so on, lightly, airily; and as Bruno wasn't his father, there wouldn't be any unpleasant interruptions, everything would go through according to plan.  So that there was really no possible excuse for feeling sick like this.  Sebastian drew three deep breaths, then pushed the button.

      The door was opened almost immediately, and there stood old man Bruno, strangely cadaverous and beaky, in a grey sweater, with crimson carpet slippers on his feet.

      His face lit up with a smile of welcome.

      'Good,' he said, 'good!'

      Sebastian took the extended hand, mumbled something about its being so awfully kind of him to write, and then averted his face in an excess of that paralysing embarrassment which always assailed him when he spoke to strangers.  But meanwhile, inside his skull, the observer and the phrase-maker were busily at work.  By daylight, he had noticed, the eyes were blue and very bright.  Blue fires in bone-cups, vivid not simply with awareness and certainly not with the detached, inhuman curiosity which had shone in Mrs Thwale's dark eyes when, last night, she had suddenly turned on the light and he had found her, on hands and knees, spanning him like an arch of white flesh.  For a long half-minute she had looked at him, wordlessly smiling.  Microscopic, in the black bright pupils, he could see his own pale reflection.  '"Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love,"' she said at last.  Then the pure mask crumpled into a grimace, she uttered her tiny stertorous grunt of laughter, reached out a slender arm towards the lamp and once more plunged the room into darkness.  With an effort, Sebastian exorcized his memories.  He looked up again into those bright, serene and extraordinarily friendly eyes.

      'You know,' said Bruno, 'I was almost expecting you.'

      'Expecting me?'

      Bruno nodded, then turned and led the way across an obscure cupboard of a hall into a small bedsitting-room, in which the only articles of luxury were the view of far-away mountains across the housetops and a square of sunlight, glowing like a huge ruby, on the tiled floor.

      'Sit down.'  Bruno indicated the more comfortable of the two chairs, and when they were settled, 'Poor Eustace!' he went on reflectively, after a pause.  He had a way, Sebastian noticed, of leaving spaces between his sentences, so that everything he said was framed, as it were, in a setting of silence.  'Tell me how it happened.'

      Breathless and somewhat incoherent with shyness, Sebastian began to tell the story.

      An expression of distress appeared on Bruno's face.

      'So suddenly!' he said, when Sebastian had finished.  'So utterly without preparation!'

      The words caused Sebastian to feel delightfully superior.  Inwardly he smiled an ironic smile.  It was almost incredible, but the old idiot seemed actually to believe in hellfire and Holy Dying.  With a studiously straight face, but still chuckling to himself, he looked up, to find the blue eyes fixed upon his face.

      'You think it sounds pretty funny?' Bruno said, after the usual second of deliberate silence.

      Startled, Sebastian blushed and stammered.

      'But I never ... I mean, really ...'

      'You mean what everybody means nowadays,' the other interposed in his quiet voice.  'Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma.  Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?'

      Sebastian hesitated.  He didn't want to be rude, because, after all, he wanted the old ass to help him.  Besides, he shrank from embarking on a controversy in which he was foredoomed by his shyness to make a fool of himself.  At the same time, nonsense was nonsense.

      'I don't see what's wrong with it,' he said cautiously, but with a faint undertone almost of truculence.

      He sat there, suddenly averted, waiting for the other's argumentative retort.  But it never came.  Prepared for attack, his resistance found itself confronted by a friendly silence and became somehow absurd and irrelevant.

      Bruno spoke at last.

      'I suppose Mrs Gamble will be holding one of her séances pretty soon.'

      'She has already,' said Sebastian.

      'Poor old thing!  What a greed for reassurance!'

      'But I must say ... well, it's pretty convincing, don't you think?'

      'Oh, something happens all right, if that's what you mean.'

      Remembering Mrs Thwale's comment, Sebastian giggled knowingly.

      'Something pretty shameless,' he said.

      'Shameless?' Bruno repeated, looking up at him in surprise.  'That's an odd word.  What makes you use it?'

      Sebastian smiled uncomfortably and dropped his eyes.

      'Oh, I don't know,' he said.  'It just seemed the right word, that's all.'

      There was another silence.  Through the sleeve of his jacket Sebastian felt for the place where she had left the mark of her teeth.  It was still painful to the touch.  Twin cannibals in bedlam ... And then he remembered that damned drawing, and that time was passing, passing.  How the devil was he to broach the subject?

      'Shameless,' Bruno said again pensively.  'Shameless.... And yet you can't see why there should be any preparation for dying?'

      'Well, he seemed perfectly happy,' Sebastian answered defensively.  'You know - jolly and amusing, like when he was alive.  That is, if it really was Uncle Eustace.'

      'If,' Bruno repeated.  'If.'

      'You don't believe ...?' Sebastian questioned in some surprise.

      Bruno leaned forward and laid his hand on the boy's knee.

      'Let's try to get this business quite clear in our minds,' he said.  'Eustace's body plus some unknown, non-bodily x equals Eustace.  And for the sake of argument let's admit that poor Eustace was as happy and jolly as you seem to think he was.  All right.  A moment comes when Eustace's body is abolished; but in view of what happens at old Mrs Gamble's séance we're forced to believe that x persists.  But before we go any further, let's ask ourselves what it really was that we learned at the séance.  We learned that x plus the medium's body equals a temporary pseudo-Eustace.  That's an empirical fact.  But meanwhile what exactly is x?  And what's happening to x when it isn't connected with the medium's body?  What happens to it?' he insisted.

      'Goodness knows.'

      'Precisely.  So don't let's pretend that we know.  And don't let's commit the fallacy of thinking that, because x plus the medium's body is happy and jolly, x by itself must also be happy and jolly.'  He withdrew his hand from Sebastian's knee and leaned back in his chair.  'Most of the consolations of spiritualism,' he went on after a little pause, 'seem to depend on bad logic - on drawing faulty inferences from the facts observed at séances.  When old Mrs Gamble hears about Summerland and reads Sir Oliver Lodge, she feels reassured; she's convinced that the next world will be just like this one.  But actually Summerland and perfectly compatible with Catherine of Genoa and ...' he hesitated, 'yes, even the Inferno.'

      'The Inferno?' Sebastian repeated.  'But surely you don't imagine ...?'  And making a last desperate effort to assure himself that Bruno was just an old ass, he laughed aloud.

      His sniggering dropped into a gulf of benevolent silence.

      'No,' said Bruno at last, 'I don't believe in eternal damnation.  But not for any reasons that I can discover from going to séances.  And still less for any reasons that I can discover from living in the world.  For other reasons.  Reasons connected with what I know about the nature ...'

      He paused and with an anticipatory smile Sebastian waited for him to trot out the word 'God'.

      '... of the Gaseous Vertebrate,' Bruno concluded.  He smiled sadly.  'Poor Eustace!  It made him feel so much safer to call it that.  As though the fact were modified by the name.  And yet he was always laughing at other people for using intemperate language.'

      'Now he's going to start on his conversion campaign,' Sebastian said to himself.

      But instead, Bruno got up, crossed over to the window and, without a word, deftly caught the big blue-bottlefly that was buzzing against the glass and tossed it out into freedom.  Still standing by the window, he turned and spoke.

      'You've got something on your mind, Sebastian,' he said.  'What is it?'

      Startled into a kind of panic suspicion, Sebastian shook his head.

      'Nothing,' he insisted; but an instant later he was cursing himself for having missed his opportunity.

      'And yet that's what you came here to talk about.'

      The smile with which the words were accompanied was without a trace of irony or patronage.  Sebastian was reassured.

      'Well, as a matter of fact ...' He hesitated for a second or two, then forced a rather theatrical little laugh.  'You see,' he said with an attempt at gaiety, 'I've been swindled.  Swindled,' he repeated emphatically; for all at once he had seen how the story could be told without any reference to Mr Tendring's discovery or his own humiliating failures to tell the truth - simply as the story of trustful inexperience and (yes, he'd admit it) childish silliness shamefully victimized and now appealing for help.  Gathering confidence as he proceeded, he told his revised version of what had happened.

      'Offering me a thousand, when he'd sold it to Uncle Eustace for seven!' he concluded indignantly.  'It's just plain swindling.'

      'Well,' said Bruno slowly, 'they have peculiar standards, these dealers.'  None more so, he might have added, on the strength of an earlier encounter with the man, than Gabriel Weyl.  But nothing would be gained, and perhaps some positive harm might be done, if he were to tell Sebastian what he knew.  'But meanwhile,' he went on, 'what do your people up at the villa think about it all?  Surely they must be wondering.'

      Sebastian felt himself blushing.

      'Wondering?' he questioned, hoping and pretending that he didn't understand what was being implied.

      'Wondering how the drawing disappeared like that.  And you must be pretty worried about it, aren't you?'

      There was a pause.  Then, without speaking, the boy nodded his head.

      'It's difficult to come to any decision,' said Bruno mildly, 'unless one knows all the relevant facts.'

      Sebastian felt profoundly ashamed of himself.

      'I'm sorry,' he whispered.  'I ought to have explained ...'

      Sheepishly, he began to supply the details he had previously omitted.

      Bruno listened without comment until the end.

      'And you were really intending to tell Mrs Ockham all about it?' he questioned.

      'I was just beginning,' Sebastian insisted.  'And then she was sent for.'

      'You didn't think of telling Mrs Thwale instead?'

      'Mrs Thwale?  Oh, goodness, no!'

      'Why goodness, no?'

      'Well ...' Embarrassed, Sebastian groped for an avowable answer.  'I don't know.  I mean, the drawing didn't belong to her.  She had nothing to do with it.'

      'And yet you say it was she who suspected the little girl.'

      'I know, but ...' Twin cannibals in bedlam - and when the light went on, the eyes were bright with the look of one who enjoys a comedy from between the curtains of the most private of boxes.

      'Well, somehow it never occurred to me.'

      'I see,' said Bruno, and was silent for a few seconds.  'If I can get the drawing back for you,' he went on at last, 'will you promise to take it straight to Mrs Ockham and tell her the whole story?'

      'Oh, I promise,' Sebastian cried eagerly.

      The other held up a bony hand.

      'Not so quick, not so quick!  Promises are serious.  Are you sure you'll be able to keep this one, if you make it?'

      'Certain!'

      'So was Simon Peter.  But cocks have a habit of crowing at the most inconvenient moments ...'

      Bruno smiled, humorously, but at the same time with a kind of compassionate tenderness.

      'As though I were ill,' Sebastian thought, as he looked into the other's face. and was simultaneously touched and annoyed - touched by so much solicitude on his behalf, but annoyed by what it implied: namely, that he was sick (mortally sick, to judge by the look in those bright blue eyes), of the inability to keep a promise.  But really that was a bit thick....

      'Well,' Bruno went on, 'the quicker we get to work the better, eh?'

      He peeled off his sweater and, opening the wardrobe, took out an old brown jacket.  Then he sat down to change his shoes.  Bending over the laces, he began to talk again.

      'When I do something wrong,' he said, 'or merely stupid, I find it very useful to draw up - not exactly a balance sheet; no, it's more like a genealogy, if you see what I mean, a family tree of the offence.  Who or what were it parents, ancestors, collaterals?  What are likely to be its descendants - in my own life and other people's?  It's surprising how far a little honest research will take one.  Down into the rat-hole of one's own character.  Back into past history.  Out into the world around one.  Forward into possible consequences.  It makes one realize that nothing one does is unimportant and nothing wholly private.'  The last knot was tied; Bruno got up.  'Well, I think that's everything,' he said, as he put on his jacket.

      'There's the money,' Sebastian mumbled uncomfortably.  He pulled out his wallet.  'I've only got about a thousand lire left.  If you could lend me the rest ... I'll return it as soon as I possibly ...'

      Bruno took the wad of notes and handed one of them back to the boy.

      'You're not a Franciscan,' he said.  'At any rate, not yet - though one day, perhaps, in mere self-defence against yourself ...' He smiled almost mischievously and, cramming the rest of the money in a trouser pocket, picked up his hat.

      'I don't suppose I shall be very long,' he said, looking back from the door.  'You'll find plenty of books to amuse you - that is, if you want an opiate, which I hope you don't.  Yes, I hope you don't,' he repeated with a sudden, insistent earnestness; then he turned and went out.

      Left to himself, Sebastian sat down again.

      It had gone off quite differently, of course, from what he had imagined, but very well.  Better, in fact, than he had ever dared to hope - except that he did wish he hadn't started by telling that revised version of what had happened.  Hoping to cut a better figure, and then having to admit, abjectly, humiliatingly, that it wasn't true.  Anyone else would have seized the opportunity to deliver the most frightful pi-jaw.  Not Bruno, however.  He felt profoundly grateful for the man's forbearance.  To have had the decency to help without first taking it out of him in a sermon - that was really extraordinary.  And he wasn't a fool either.  What he had said about the genealogy of an offence, for example ...

      'The genealogy of an offence,' he whispered in the silence, 'the family tree ...'

      He began to think of the lies he had told and of all their ramifying antecedents and accompaniments and consequences.  He oughtn't to have told them, of course; but, on the other hand, if it hadn't been for his father's idiotic principles he wouldn't have had to tell them.  And if it hadn't been for the slums and rich men with cigars, like poor Uncle Eustace, his father wouldn't have had those idiotic principles.  And yet Uncle Eustace had been thoroughly kind and decent.  Whereas that anti-fascist professor - one wouldn't trust him an inch.  And how boring most of his father's left-wing, lower-class friends were!  How unutterably dreary!  But dreary and boring, he remembered, to him; and that was probably his fault.  Just as it was his fault that those evening clothes should have seemed so indispensable - because other boys had them, because they would be those girls at Tom Boveney's party.  But one oughtn't to consider what other people did or thought; and the girls would turn out to be just another excuse for sensual daydreamings that were destined henceforward to be haunted by memories of last night's reality of unimaginable shamelessness and alienation.  Cannibals in bedlam - and the door of the madhouse had been locked against the last chance of telling the truth.  Meanwhile, in some crowded peasant's cottage at the remote unvisited end of the garden, a child in tears was perhaps even now protesting her innocence under an angry cross-examination.  And when blows and threats had failed to elicit the information she didn't possess, that old she-devil of a Mrs Gamble would insist on sending for the police; and then everybody would be questioned, everybody - himself included.  But would he be able to stick to his story?  And if they took it into their heads to go and talk to Weyl, what reason would he have for withholding the truth?  And then ... Sebastian shuddered.  But now, thank God, old man Bruno had come to the rescue.  The drawing would be bought back; he'd make a clean breast of the whole business to Mrs Ockham - irresistibly, so that she'd start crying and say he was just like Frankie - and everything would be all right.  The children of his lie would either remain unborn or else be smothered in their cradles, and the lie itself would be as though it had never been uttered.  Indeed, for all practical purposes, one could now say that it never had been uttered.

      'Never,' Sebastian said to himself emphatically, 'never.'

      His spirits rose, he began to whistle, and suddenly, in a flash of intensely pleasurable illumination, he perceived how well the notion of the genealogy of offences would fit into the scheme of his new poem.  Patterns of atoms; but chaos of the molecules assembled in the stone.  Patterns of living cells and organs and physiological functioning, but chaos of men's behaviour in time.  And yet even in that chaos there was law and logic; there was a geometry even of disintegration.  The square on lust is equal, so to speak, to the sum of the squares on vanity and idleness.  The shortest distance between two cravings is violence.  And what about the lies he had been telling?  What about broken promises and betrayals?  Phrases began to form themselves in his mind.

 

                                             Belial his blubber lips and Avarice

                                             Pouting a trap-tight sphincter, voluptuously

                                             Administer the lingering Judas kiss ...

 

He pulled out his pencil and scribbling-pad, and started to write. '... the lingering Judas kiss.'  And, after Judas, the crucifixion.  But death had many ancestors besides greed and falsehood, many other forms than voluntary martyrdom.  He recalled an article he had read somewhere about the character of the next war.  'And the dead children,' he wrote,

 

                                             And the dead children lying about the streets

                                             Like garbage, when the bombardiers have done -

                                             These the mild sluggard murders while he snores,

                                             And Calvin, father of a thousand whores,

                                             Murders in pulpits, logically, for a syllogism ...

 

An hour later a key turned in the lock.  Startled, and at the same time annoyed, by the unwelcome interruption, Sebastian came to the surface from the depths of his absorbed abstraction and looked towards the door.

      Bruno met his eye and smiled.

      'Eccolo!' he said, holding up a thin rectangular package wrapped in brown paper.

      Sebastian looked at it, and for a second couldn't think what it was.  Then recognition came; but so completely had he convinced himself that Bruno would succeed, and that all his troubles were already over, that the actual sight of the drawing left him almost indifferent.

      'Oh, the thing,' he said, 'the Degas.'  Then, realizing that mere politeness demanded a display of gratitude and delight, he raised his voice and cried, 'Oh, thank you, thank you!  I can never ... I mean, you've been so extraordinarily decent....'

      Bruno looked at him without speaking.  'A small cherub in grey flannel trousers,' he said to himself, remembering the phrase that Eustace had used at the station.  And it was true that smile was angelical, in spite of its calculatedness.  There was a kind of lovely and supernatural innocence about the boy, even when, as now, he was obviously acting a part.  And, incidentally, why should he be acting a part?  And considering the panic he had been in an hour ago, why was it that he didn't know feel genuinely glad and grateful?  Scrutinizing the delicately beautiful face before him, Bruno sought in vain for an answer to his questions.  All he could find in it was the brute fact of that seraphic naïveté shining enchantingly through childish hypocrisy, the guilelessness even in deliberate cunning.  And because of that guilelessness people would always love him - always, whatever he might be betrayed into doing or leaving undone.  But that wasn't by any means the most dangerous consequence of being a seraph - but a seraph out of heaven, deprived of the beatific vision, unaware, indeed, of the very existence of God.  No, the most dangerous consequence was that, whatever he might do or leave undone, he himself would tend, because of the beauty of his own intrinsic innocence, to spare himself the salutary agonies of contrition.  Being angelical, he would be loved, not only by other people, but also by himself - through thick and thin, with a love unexpungable by any force less violent than major disaster.  Once again, Bruno felt himself moved by a profound compassion.  Sebastian, the predestined target, the delicate and radiant butt of God alone knew what ulterior flights of arrows - piercing enjoyments, successes poisoned with praise and barbed to stick; and then, if Providence was merciful enough to send an antidote, pains and humiliations and defeats....

      'Been writing?' he asked at last, noticing the pad and pencil, and making them the excuse for breaking the long silence.

      Sebastian blushed and stowed them away in his pocket.

      'I'd been thinking of what you were saying just before you went out,' he answered.  'You know, about things having genealogies....'

      'And you've been working out the genealogy of your own mistakes?' Bruno asked with a glad hopefulness.

      'Well, not exactly.  I was ... Well, you see, I'm working on a new poem, and this seemed to fit in so well....'

      Bruno thought of the interview from which he had just come, and smiled with a touch of rather rueful amusement.  Gabriel Weyl had ended by yielding; but the surrender had been anything but graceful.  Against his will - for he had done his best to put them out of mind - Bruno found himself remembering the ugly words that had been spoken, the passionate gestures of those hirsute and beautifully manicured hands, that face distorted and pale with fury.  He sighed, laid his hat and the drawing on the bookcase, and sat down.

      'The Gospel of Poverty,' he said slowly.  'In the beginning were the words, and the words were with God, and the words were God.  Here endeth the first, last and only lesson.'

      There was a silence.  Sebastian sat quite still, with averted face, staring at the floor.  He was feeling ashamed of himself and at the same time resentful of the fact that he had been made to feel ashamed.  After all, there was nothing wrong about poetry; so why on earth shouldn't he write, if he felt like it?

      'Can I see what you've done?' Bruno asked at last.

      Sebastian blushed again and mumbled something about its being no good; but finally handed over the scribbling-pad.

      '"Belial his blubber lips,"' Bruno began aloud, then continued his reading in silence.  'Good!' he said, when he had finished.  'I wish I could say the thing as powerfully as that.  If I'd been able to,' he added with a little smile, 'perhaps you'd have spent your time make out your own genealogy, instead of writing something that may move other people to make out theirs.  But then, of course, you have the luck to have been born a poet.  Or is it the misfortune?'

      'The misfortune?' Sebastian repeated.

      'Every Fairy Godmother is also potentially the Wicked Fairy?'

      'Why?'

      'Because it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man ...' He left the sentence unfinished.

      'But I'm not rich,' Sebastian protested, thinking resentfully of what his father's stinginess had forced him to do.

      'Not rich?  Read your own verses!'  Bruno handed back the scribbling-pad.  'And when you've done that, look at your image in a mirror.'

      'Oh, I see....'

      'And women's eyes - those are mirrors when they come close enough,' Bruno added.

      When they come close enough - looking down at the comedy, with the microscopic image of nature's lay idiot reflected in their ironic brightness.  Feeling extremely uneasy, Sebastian wondered what the man would say next.  But to his great relief the talk took a less personal turn.

      'And yet,' Bruno went on reflectively, 'a certain number of the intrinsically rich do succeed in getting through the needle's eye.  Bernard, for example.  And perhaps Augustine, though I always wonder if he wasn't the victim of his own incomparable style.  And Thomas Aquinas.  And obviously François de Sales.  But they're few, they're few.  The great majority of the rich get stuck, or never even attempt the passage.  Did you ever read a life of Kant?' he asked parenthetically.  'Or of Nietzsche?'

      Sebastian shook his head.

      'Well, perhaps you'd better not,' said Bruno.  'It's difficult, if one does, to avoid uncharitableness.  And then Dante....' He shook his head, and there was a silence.

      'Uncle Eustace talked about Dante,' Sebastian volunteered.  'That last evening it was - just before ...'

      'What did he say?'

      Sebastian did his best to reproduce the substance of the conversation.

      'And he was perfectly right,' said Bruno, when he had finished.  'Except, of course, that Chaucer isn't any solution to the problem.  Being worldly in one way and writing consummately well about this world is no better than being worldly in another way and writing consummately well about the next world.  No better for oneself, that's to say.  When it comes to the effect on other people ...' He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.  '"Let Austin have his swink to him reserved."  Or

 

                                             e la sua volontate è nostra pace;

                                             ell'è quel mare al qual tutto si move,

                                             ciò ch'ella crea e che nature face.

 

I know which of them I'd choose.  Can you understand Dante, by the way?'

      Sebastian shook his head, but immediately made up for this admission of ignorance by showing off a little.

      'If it were Greek,' he said, 'or Latin, or French ...'

      'But unfortunately it's Italian,' Bruno interposed matter of factly.  'But Italian's worth learning, if only for the sake of what those lines can do for you.  And yet,' he added, 'how little they did for the man who actually wrote them!  Poor Dante - the way he pats himself on the back for belonging to such a distinguished family!  Not to mention the fact that he's the only man who was ever allowed to visit heaven before he died.  And even in Paradise he can't stop raging and railing about contemporary politics.  And when he gets to the sphere of the Contemplatives, what does he make Benedict and Peter Damian talk about?  Not love or liberation, nor the practice of the presence of God.  No, no; they spend all their time, as Dante liked to spend his - denouncing other people's bad behaviour and threatening them with hellfire.'  Sadly, Bruno shook his head.  'Such a waste of such enormous gifts - it makes one feel inclined to weep.'

      'Why do you suppose he wasted himself like that?'

      'Because he wanted to.  And if you ask why he went on wanting to after he'd written about God's will being our peace, the answer is that that's how genius works.  It has insights into the nature of ultimate reality and it gives expression to the knowledge so obtained.  Gives expression to it either explicitly in things like "e la sua volontate è nostra pace," or implicitly, in the white spaces between the lines, so to speak - by writing beautifully.  And of course you can write beautifully about anything, from the Wife of Bath to Baudelaire's affreuse juive and Gray's pensive Selima.  And incidentally, the explicit statements about reality don't convey very much unless they too are written poetically.  Beauty is truth; truth beauty.  The truth about the beauty is given in the lines, and the beauty of the truth in the white spaces between them.  If the white spaces are merely blank, the lines are just ... just Hymns Ancient and Modern.'

      'Or late Wordsworth,' put in Sebastian.

      'Yes, and don't forget the very early Shelley,' said Bruno.  'The adolescent can be quite as inept as the old.'  He smiled at Sebastian.  'Well, as I was saying,' he continued in another tone, 'explicitly or implicitly, men of genius express their knowledge of reality.  But they themselves very rarely act on their knowledge.  Why not?  Because all their energy and attention are absorbed by the work of composition.  They're concerned with writing, not with acting or being.  But because they're only concerned with writing about their knowledge, they prevent themselves from knowing more.'

      'What do you mean?' Sebastian asked.

      'Knowledge is proportionate to being,' Bruno answered.  'You know in virtue of what you are; and what you are depends on three factors: what you've inherited, what your surroundings have done to you, and what you've chosen to do with your surroundings and your inheritance.  A man of genius inherits an unusual capacity to see into ultimate reality and to express what he sees.  If his surroundings are reasonably good he'll be able to exercise his powers.  But if he spends all his energies on writing and doesn't attempt to modify his inherited and acquired being in the light of what he knows, then he can never get to increase his knowledge.  On the contrary, he'll know progressively less instead of more.'

      'Less instead of more?' Sebastian repeated questioningly.

      'Less instead of more,' the other insisted.  'He that is not getting better is getting worse, and he that is getting worse is in a position to know less and less and less about the nature of ultimate reality.  Conversely, of course, if he gets better and knows more, one will be tempted to stop writing, because the all-absorbing labour of composition is an obstacle in the way of further knowledge.  And that, maybe, is one of the reasons why most men of genius take such infinite pains not to become saints - out of mere self-preservation.  So you get Dante writing angelic lines about the will of God and in the next breath giving vent to his rancours and vanities.  You get Wordsworth worshipping God in nature and preaching admiration, hope and love, while all the time he cultivates an egotism that absolutely flabbergasts the people who know him.  You get Milton devoting a whole epic to man's first disobedience and consistently exhibiting a pride worthy of his own Lucifer.  And finally,' he added, with a little laugh, 'you get young Sebastian perceiving the truth of an important general principle - the interrelationship of good and evil - and using all his energy not to act on it, which would be a bore, but to turn it into verse, which he thoroughly enjoys.  "Calvin, father of a thousand whores" is pretty good, I grant you; but something personal and practical might have been still better.  Mightn't it?  However, as I said before, In the beginning were the words, and the words were with God, and the words were God.'  He got up and crossed over to the door of the kitchen.  'And now let's see what we can scrape together for lunch,' he said.